hobbs

I've heard the same from the lawyers I know as well.

Suddenly, being an IT professional doesn't seem that bad...

Heh. It's ironic that XML was designed to represent text documents, but is now mostly used to hold data. Maybe if they had named it eXtensible Table Language, they would have enticed people to put text into it like they do with the <table> element.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

- Emerson

That is, using div vs. table or vice versa, just because you're "supposed to" strikes me as being contrary to the true hacker mindset.

Well, there's democracy and then there's mobocracy.

Democracy says that this place is peopled with hackers and if the hacker citizens upvote a story then it is, ipso facto, of interest to hackers.

Mobocracy says that demi-hackers trickle in and start upvoting stories and posting comments that attract quasi-hackers. The quasi-hackers then attract non-hackers and you eventually no longer have a narrow community. The stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator then rise to the top, due to sheer statistics.

Damn! That's why I can't get into Twitter again!

Hmm... does ballet count as social hacker news? No? Oh well, I can link to several sci-fi book reviews on Amazon instead.

(Move along. Nothing to see here. All of you redders and diggers can go back home now.)

I didn't have a problem with the layout, since I tend to use lynx. I thought it was a shame, though, that the author isn't a better writer. The content is fascinating, but it took some effort to follow along. (I guess I'm too accustomed to PG and JS :)

It did suddenly stop - because it hit a wall. The first one gave him absolutely no resistance at all. He just picked it up and threw it.

Also, those have to be cheapest cube walls I've ever seen. The desks are the only things holding them upright.

Yeah, strange how the monitors didn't have any cables attached to them. I'd expect the computer case to hitchhike for at least part of the ride.

Come again?

And yet we have a sensationalist article about brain surgeons' cell phones shoot to the top spot?

Good luck getting people to be picky.

Yes, but the more important question is: do urologists keep their phones on their belt or in their pockets?

You can get all of that by using mod_rewrite/mod_fastcgi/mod_wsgi to passthrough to a full-blown Python app server running behind the web server as a separate process. All of the other mod_* authentication and authorization hurdles will still be evaluated first.

For me, eBay was never about the auctions. I could care less about auctions - they're usually more of a nuisance than anything. It's about finding low-cost surplus or used products in a structured and organized shop.

It's a one-stop antique store, swap-meet, and Crazy Louie's surplus store. I'd much prefer for the sellers to lower their prices to attract the customers, rather than vice-versa.

If that's what they'll eventually evolve into, good on them.

One word: indirection.

With each level of indirection, you get one more level of sophistication, but at the cost of one more level of complexity. OO has tons of indirection (+cough+ polymorphism +cough+).

Back in the old C++ days, before decent IDE's, I remember tracking through multiple code files in several different directories, just to figure out if an add operator had been overloaded - and if so, how. Man, was that a complex pain!

Lately, with Java, I've found myself in the same situation, but with XML config files. Some Java developers just love XML config files and often use them to direct reflective code execution (dynamic language envy). Needless to say, my IDE's are failing me again.

Call me skeptical if you will, but the article's flavor contains a hint too much breathless exuberance for my taste.

Most UI code is intrinsically event-based. e.g., "on click, do this", "on resize, do that"

Erlang comes to mind as a good event-based language. Strangely, it is rarely (if ever) used for UI.

Indeed, I found that this statement sounded alarms in my critical thinking cortex:

"the Singleton "pattern" encourages you to forget everything you know about OO design, since OO is hard, and procedural is easy."

Why, oh why, are we encouraging people to use OO 100% of the time, when it's admittedly harder than the alternatives? (I'm looking at you, Java.) Methinks the bandwagon continues to play on, even after two decades...

For me, it's about passion and interest. I'd much rather be in a creation role: building, coding, designing. [Middle] Management, on the other hand, seems to be more about babby-sitting other people's kids.

Heh. Interesting that they've stopped using the term "piracy" so much now that pirates are thought of as debonair swashbucklers who are sticking it to The Man, instead of as the murderous thugs that they actually were (are). Thank you, Johnny Depp.

Gack! Piracy IS NOT THEFT. It is copyright infringement. The copyright lobby would like you to believe that it is theft, but it is not. If you pirate a $10K software suite, you will not be charged with grand theft: software.

Theft, by definition, transfers value from the original possessor use to the thief - a zero sum transaction where the thief gains at the owner's loss. Copyright infringement does not do so. It only deprives the original possessor of potential future value. (You could even argue within some legal jurisdictions that there is copyright infringement only when the pirate derives commercial gain from the copy.)

Overheard from This Week in Media (http://www.pixelcorps.tv/this_week_in_media):

Post-production houses and graphical design companies often demand that all job applicants already have Photoshop experience. Yet for someone who doesn't already have a job, they can't afford Photoshop in order to get experience. The unspoken industry solution is that everyone has a pirated copy of Photoshop for personal use.

Also mentioned is that the big 3D modeling/rendering packages that everyone uses for production work (3D Studio, Maya, and LightWave) also happen to be the most pirated 3D software. Coincidence? Is the dog wagging the tail, or is the tail wagging the dog?

True enough. I guess my point is that there were previous debates about banning TechCrunch, which has articles that are spot-on topic but of questionable validity, and then we get an article about farming regulations shooting to the top spot. I mean c'mon guys, do you want to be picky or not?

Hell, if this is the criteria for what constitutes relevant news, we may as well have articles that debate the relative merits of different world religions. After all, the debates would help shed light about how to think about our own religious wars within the hacker community.

Honestly, I have just as much of a laissez-faire libertarian philosophy as the next hacker, but there are plenty of other forums that are better suited to spreading the word. (cough reddit, cough digg)

This is the top "Hacker News"?

No rockstars here. We have plenty of ninja coders, though.

I know it's off-topic, but would you mind recommending an alternative that is reasonable?

It is possible to prove, mathematically, that DRM cannot work when an attacker has physical possession of the machine. It is simply impossible - unless the CPU can execute encrypted code where the decryption key is a galactic secret and cannot be found using an electron microscope.

When the code executes on a remote server, however, you have a completely different kettle of fish.

Personally, I had to uninstall Alcohol 120% before SP3 would even install. (It somehow locks up atapi.sys) It was a bit of a pain to find the source of the problem in the knowledge base, and I imagine the problem would have been a total deal-breaker for anyone who isn't a geek.